Sunday, July 30, 2017

“Edinorossus vulgaris’ Even More Morally Flexible than Any Member of Soviet-Era Nomenklatura , Yakovenko Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 30 – Members of the
Soviet nomenklatura as officials named from above by the CPSU were known and
were so brilliantly described by Mikhail Voslensky a generation ago followed
every twist and turn in the party line, but their successors – the senior
people in the ruling United Russia Party – are even more morally flexible than
their predecessors.

That is the argument of Moscow
commentator Igor Yakovenko who suggests the term edinorossus vulgaris as the most appropriate description of the
ultra-obedient and flexible “everyday United Russia” leader, who is capable of
saying things that no Soviet nomenklaturshchik
ever would (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=597CD55C2A682).

Many people simply view the current
species as a direct continuation of the earlier one, Yakovenko says; but there
are important differences. No member of the nomenklatura could ever dream of
having the wealth that United Russia people do, and no one of them could ever advise
people in financial difficulties, as one Sverdlovsk United Russia official did,
to “eat less.”

According to the Moscow commentator,
“an important evolutionary advance of the Soviet nomenklaturshchik was a flexible spine, but the degree of
elasticity of the ordinary United Russia man is immeasurably greater” because
unlike his predecessor “there is no core in the form of Marxism, communism, and
also internationalism and other -isms.”

Edinorossus vulgaris “in the course of a
long and difficult evolution has rejected” all of them as unnecessary and even
harmful “in the world of political struggle for survival in the era of
developed Putinism,” Yakovenko says. As a result, there have been significant
and irreversible changes in the brains of the ordinary United Russia leader.

“The
structures responsible for logic, empathy, and one’s own dignity have all
disappeared.”That becomes obvious,
Yakovenko suggests, if one compares members of the Soviet nomenklatura with
such figures as Yarovaya, Zhelenyak, Markov, Fedorov, Milonov and Poklonskaya.

This
year marks the centenary of the birth of homo
soveticus, the commentator continues, noting that “one of the first to
describe this strange anthropological type” was the philosopher Sergey
Bulgakov. He has been followed by researchers at the Harvard Project in the
early 1950s and then by the research of Yury Levada in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Many
archeologists,” Yakovenko recalls, “dream of being in Ancient Rome. Many
paleontologists would like to see a living dinosaur.Russian social scientists and anthropologists
are incredibly lucky: they can observe while living the surprising zigzag of
human evolution by examining the large population of everyday United Russia
people.”